We’re excited to announce that developers can now start building voice experiences, called “skills,” for customers in Brazil using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) with the new Portuguese for Brazil voice model.

The Alexa team is constantly inventing new ways for you to take your skills to the next level. We’re excited to showcase these inventions to developers around the world May 2 during Alexa Live, Alexa’s first online-only conference for voice developers. Learn more and register.

To make it computationally feasible to train a speech recognizer on a million hours of speech, Alexa scientists used an array of techniques that could generalize to other large-scale machine learning projects.

Today, we’re excited to announce that the Alexa Skills Kit now enables select Covered Entities and their Business Associates subject to the U.S.HIPAA to build Alexa skills that transmit and receive protected health information as part of an invite-only program.